This is “Black Friday” but I am not out spending my meager salary on all those bargains! What I actually did was a little house keeping on my personal home office computer. Anyone reading this should heed this bit of advice. Computers need their guts blown out at least once a year.
Sounds a bit drastic but what I am saying is nothing but a little dusting and cleaning. Computers get hot inside so there are lots of fans and things with fins (heat sinks) to keep components cool. Those parts will eventually plug up with dust and become far less efficient at what they are supposed to be doing, as I said keeping things cool.
I have shop air available. That’s an air compressor, hose and air gun. It is the perfect tool for blowing out the cobwebs in computer cases. The most important device is the cooler on the CPU (central processing unit) They are the heavy heaters and can get plugged solid with dust. I just blew a thick cloud of dust out of my AMD 64 heat sink fins. Almost as bad was the dust that had accumulated inside the power supply, another large dust cloud filled the shop. I was glad the overhead door was open.
I wrote in an earlier post that the CPU fan had melted on my shop computer because the heat sink fins were plugged. The CPU got so hot it distorted the plastic fan case. The CPU survived and lives on. I am now ahead of that curve on my office machine.
While I was poking around on the inside of the computer case, I pulled one of my DDR memory chips out. I always knew the memory was reported as running at 333 MHz when booting. I was certain I had purchased 400 MHz memory (4 GIGS of it) when I built the machine about 3 years ago. Sure enough, it is oCZ PC3200 rated for 400 MHz at 2.8 Volts.
The motherboard (an ASUS A8N-SLI Premium) has a lot of overclocking features built in. I only wanted a stable workhorse so I set everything to “AUTO” and let it run as it desired way back then. Today I decided I should play with settings and see if I can get the faster memory for which I had paid.
The Vista OS performance rating on this computer was 4.6 with memory being the slowest element. I had to study what 2-3-2-5 meant on the memory. Very hard information to find but they are all timing parameters for the memory. In order they are TCL -TRCD – TRP – TRAS. I won’t go into a lot of tweaking and overclocking mumbo-jumbo, but I set the memory to 400 MHz, 2.8 Volts, and 2-3-2-5. Technically I don’t think this is overclocking, more like right clocking.
The computer boot up now reports 400 MHz memory. No magic smoke. Might be something to this overclocking, the computer is still booting. I ran the Vista OS Performance test and the memory went to a 5.1 from the 4.6. Wow! Disk performance increased too so I ended up with a 5.0 overall. That seems good to me! I feel better now that everything is at or well over a 5.0.
The best part is I have a new, clean, faster computer for free! 🙂